The First Year

Reflections, confections and projections. Recommendations and promises. Unsolicited confessions. Stand-up comedy.

Well, the first year of Lux Umbra Dei is fast approaching. I guess it's a good time to look back and try to do some summing up. “Back” and “up”? - you don't usually see those in the same sentence! But then this newsletter is a bit quirky, nay outright eccentric: an eclectic miscellany of science, logic, philosophy, fiction, puzzles, and religious ranting. Most everything from the pen of an amateur- essentially calorific but not too nutritious- frothy confections actually.. But I try my hardest! Lux is an earnest confectioner at least. And prolific too! You’re not paying much (in fact nothing) but look how many times this intellectual junk mail arrives in your email box! Don’t make the grave mistake that high quantity implies low quality. It doesn't- you're getting the best second- and third-rate product this wannabe can whip up. I always wanted to be a third-rate writer! Success! Just like I used to be a third-rate pool hustler in early times. Just like I used to be a world-class ultramarathoner! (That is if I had ever lived in a little town called “World” population 123.) World class! (cue drum riff) Which I didn't. So I wasn’t. But at least I am a bright third-rater! Tested bright. Several step ladders and a footstool (they still sell those things at Walmart)) above the norm! Yet my dumb sisters claim to be brighter than me. How can that be? I’m not smart enough to quote Eimsteim, much less spell the dude’s name correctly, but I can quote Curly Bill Brocius in Tombstone, “I ain’t kidding neither!” A double negative, that.

All seriousness aside, this year has been big fun writing LUD and next year we can all look forward to both fun and perhaps thought-provokimg material on a wide range of topics. In the bullpen of drafts we have, figuratively warming up, articles on:

Fair Division Theory-fairly wonkish but fun (ever heard of moving-knife algorithms? Don't fret- you'll get to!) Not to mention IPS, OPS, FIPS, and MIPS! (leave it to those wacky geometers to complexify a simple thing like cutting a cake!) Or make it a thing of contention as do the economists when they get their Shapely/Nash/Borda grappling hooks into the subject!

We’ll also wander into the Opaque Forest again, this time at a more technical level, hoping to find our way to the world of not Oz, but to Superdeterminism by pursuing the concept of shortest paths. Follow the Yellow Brick Road. We have to.

To use an extended baseball metaphor* there's many more such topics waiting in the bullpen with their fastballs, their Impossibility balls, Stochastic noise balls, Blind Spot pitches, Evil God balls, Meriological choice balls (Exactly how much money to sell out your sweetie?) and so much more. Here's a short partial list of them:

Laminar flows & police procedurals; the crumbling Mesoamerican Biologic Corridor (prepare to pack your bags for Canada, if not Baffin Island!); Pareidolia (do you see a pattern here?); Scrambles, error-correcting codes and cryptography in daily life!; Self-inducing structures - do you induce youself?; Malignant models and Repugnant conclusions; the philosophy of crime and wrongdoing (anthropoid Lucy would get a year in County Jail if she lived today!); Ramsey and Shannon, AGI and Biotech, Ants Aliens and philosopher-Aardvarks, fiction, religious opining, unhinged, freewheeling ranting… Not to mention further visits to the Philosophers Tower, the hijinks of the APA’s stable of Paradoxes, visits from the Futurians, and the musings of Pangar the cat!

Lux, currently with an .064 batting average, will take swings at them all! I need to take a nap just thinking about it. And maybe you will too, reading the essays!

So out with the old first publishing year and, health permitting, soon starts the new one! Looking forward to it!

In the meanwhile, we still have ten days to the anniversary and will send out a few posts until then. Batter up!

*To all our readers in other continents who aren't big devotees of that sport, Lux extends his apologies. Even he usually falls asleep by the fifth inning except when his beloved Orioles are playing.